Old Masters, New World: America's Raid on Europe's Great Pictures [Paperback]

I just finished Old Masters, New World, and I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it from cover to cover. Cynthia Saltzman possesses a rare talent for combining scrupulous research with lively narration and telling social commentary. She clearly possesses a firm and reliable background in art history, knows the art world and art market like the back of her hand, and her insights into the psychology of the major collectors of the Gilded Age are spot on. I write frequently on the history of collecting myself for Apollo magazine, and I know that I will be using Saltzman's excellent book as a ready reference in the future. My only regret is that I didn't get a copy of this book in galley form in time to review it professionally, as I would have loved to sing its praises in print. I can't recommend this book highly enough to people interested in art, art collecting, or turn-of-the-century American history. It's a blast!

-- Jonathan Lopez, author of The Man Who Made Vermeers

This excellent book is written for the general reader and is based on deep and solid research and thorough knowledge. Author Saltzman wears her learning lightly and her prose sparkles as she chronicles the nearly forty year (roughly from the mid-1880's until 1921) "raid" by American collectors with large personal fortunes on the great Old Masters privately held in Europe. She does this by concentrating on the preeminent collectors such as Henry Marquand, Isabella Stewart Gardner, J. P. Morgan, Harry and Louisine Havemeyer and Henry Clay Frick and others, together with the consultants and dealers who advised them, sought to manipulate them and sometimes were less than honest with them. The competition that resulted is the basis for several of the great art museums in the US today.

Although some of the collectors were motivated in part by a desire to give America a great culture to match its rising power, most of them were fiercely competitive with one another, each seeking to outdo the others and possess the recognized top collection in terms of beauty or monetary worth or both. Each wanted to have the most "great works" by the "greatest artists." The only restraint was the size of their respective fortunes, which sometimes (as in the case of Granger) imposed limits. The narration is enlivened by adroit sketches of the lives and personalities of the salient persons involved in the race to acquire (by the collectors) and to become rich and influential (dealers and others). Saltzman is equally adroit in describing the power, appeal and importance of the great pictures the collectors sought.

Although always discreet, Saltzman's pen portraits are filled with incisive observations on character and psychology. Marquand, for example, emerges as more altruistic in motive than most while Frick obsessively focused on amassing the most valuable collection in the US (priding himself on driving as hard a bargain as possible for each acquisition). Frick, in keeping with his personality and his occasionally ruthless business career, created his own posthumous museum where his collection would be displayed in his NYC mansion just as it had been in his lifetime. Granger did much the same thing with her collection. The famous connoisseur Bernard Berenson, for his part, comes across as something less than honest and straightforward in his interactions with dealers and collectors.

This whole episode is well known to art historians but much less so among general readers. This brilliant book should remedy that.

Old Masters, New World is 'light' reading by design, popular cultural history, an entertaining group biography of the Daddy Warbucks art collectors who emerged from America's Gilded Age with millions to spend on the sort of Art that would dignify their wealth and possibly erase the public image of their rapacious greed. In effect, the Economic Elite wielded their millions to assert themselves as the Cultural Elite, with the toady help of the Intellectual Elite, for the paternalistic benefit of the 99% of Americans who weren't Elite in any fashion. WE the latter thank them, to be sure, when we worshipfully elbow each other through the museums of New York, Boston, DC, Chicago - the mausoleums of their inordinate pride.

The great purchasers portrayed in this book, AKA the Robber Barons, were Henry Marquand, Isabella Stewart Gardiner, JP Mrgan, Harry Havemeyer, and -- most vividly and extensively -- Henry Clay Frick, the arch-villain of labor exploitation who callously incited the most violent incident of strike-breaking in American history. Author Cynthia Saltzman treats most of her moneybag subjects with a certain gentle 'detachment' but she plainly finds Frick hard to love. Her brief account of the Homestead Strike is less condemnatory than her depiction of Frick's egotism, his monumental sense of entitlement, his stingy bullying of living artists and art-dealers in his pursuit of the works of the dead Masters whose portraits of aristocrats 'validated' his own grandeur. The museum that Frick built, on the east side of Central Park in New York, by the by, is one of my favorites in the world. I go there whenever I have a 'day off' in the Big Apple, to gaze lovingly at the Vermeers, El Grecos, and Turners. I try not to disrupt my appreciation with thoughts about the odd compatibility of art and evil.

Saltzman also depicts the art-dealers and professional connoisseurs who selected and supplied the "Old Masters" to their eager American clients, whom they did their very best to 'fleece' as often as possible. As usual, the 'aesthetes' held the plutocrats in amused contempt. The most contemptuous, and contemptible, of the lot was Bernard Berenson, who cozened and cheated Isabella Stewart Gardiner shamelessly. Berenson's books on the painters of the Italian Renaissance were still part of the 'canon' of genteel genius when I was a student in Boston in the early 1960's, though his reputation had already been tarnished. Even today I hate to treat Berenson disloyally; after all, I've spent several exhilarating sojourns at his villa 'I Tatti' near Florence, which is now operated as an institute by Harvard University. But he was a self-serving scamp for certain.

"Old Masters, New World" is not a history of art or a examination of aesthetics. It's a social history of the extended generation, from the end of the Civil War in the USA to the catastrophe of World War 1, which saw America rise to global economic might, and subsequently to the crude cultural arrogance portrayed in the novels of Henry James and Mark Twain. James, as one would expect, pops out of the closet here and there in Saltzman's narrative.

Saltzman writes deftly and colorfully, making her scholarship pleasant enough to read merely as a tale of adventure in the marketplace. It's definitely a worthwhile choice for anyone who enjoys a museum visit now and then, and who has ever wondered how the immense collections of the Met or the National Gallery were assembled. It's a story of pillage, to be blunt. The book's subtitle says it plainly: America's RAID on Europe's great pictures.